My topic for the Flat Connections Global Project was Robotics and Its Impact on Society and the Global Community. Arobotis a mechanical device that can be programmed to do tasks and interact with its environment without the help of human interaction. Robotics is a technological branch of science that deals with the design, manufacturing and application of robots. The wordroboticswas first used by Russian-born American science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. His first use of the term was in 1942 in his short story “Runabout.” In the story, he referred to the robots as helpful servants of man and viewed them as “a better, cleaner race.” Since the first use of the word, robotics have advanced immensely. They have made a huge impact on society in a multitude of ways. Forexample, milking-robots have been created to milk cows. The robot uses an industrial robot-arm and some laser-sensors to milk the cows 24 hours a day, fully automatically. This allows farmers to abandon their very early mornings and late nights in order to do things like sleep more or go shopping or do something else social. This is just the tipping point of what robots can do. During my research, I also found that in February of 2017, a video was leaked of a humanoid robot called“Handle”created by the people at Boston Dynamics. A full video was then released displaying all of the advanced things Handles can do. The wheeled robot stands 6.5 feet tall when fully extended, although, it usually crouches to turn or balance. The robot is powered by batteries allowing it to crouch down, make sharp turns, and lift objects that weigh at least 100 pounds. It can travel up to 9 mph and can go about 15 miles on one charge. As if all of this wasn't amazing enough, the robot can also jump four feet in the air. I found it incredible that a robot can perform actions similar to humans and do things we can’t.

My wiki team had some trouble with our wiki, so I wasn’t completely happy with it. Although we gathered good and interesting information, the wiki itself was very unorganized. On our wiki, there wasn’t one clear format; many different fonts and font sizes were used. Also, we didn’t always cite things clearly. URLs were left at the end of paragraphs and our works cited had some formatting issues. Someone attempted to implement a number system in order to format the works cited, however, only a few people followed it. Overall, our wiki had good information, but failed to organize it efficiently.

The outsourced video I created was of me saying, “Online learning would be great for students who can’t read or write well.” The person was unclear in what they exactly wanted said, so I had to improvise a little bit. Although I made the outsourced video, I don’t know if it went into the person’s final video. I did not see their video on the master list of videos, and I could not find them on the Ning.

I requested an outsourced video of someone saying, "Robots are becoming much more prevalent in our daily lives, and the robot population will continue to increase for years to come." I received the video fromStephenV_DFHS, however I did not use the video he sent me. The person in the video did not speak clearly and did not read the sentence fluently. I ended up getting a completely different video fromChrisR_AAHS. I had her record her phone screen and on it she used Google to search “How big is the robot population?” The new outsourced video fit better with my video.